The Engineer

Supposed true tale "The Engineer" shoulda been topical & interesting, but its production standards (under director Danny A Abeckaser), writing (Kosta Kondilopoulos) & acting are SO bad it fails completely. In 1995 Yahya Ayyash (Adam Haloon) masterminded horrific Hamas terrorist bombings across Israel - so was hunted in Gaza by Shin Bet agents (led by Emile Hirsch (of the tanked career)) and an ex-Mossad hit squad (led by Angel Bonanni - funded by US Sentaor Robert Davi who wants to personlly kill Ayyash to avenge his daughter who died in the attacks (true story huh?)). This cheap, pitiful tosh is certainly NOT another "Zero Dark Thirty".

Wow this sounded interesting but what a let down. This movie has Robert Davi and that's it. Everything else about it has the look and feel of a bad student film. Absolutely ridiculous. A complete embarrassment to the entertainment industry. The direction is just awful and most of the acting, Robert Davi excluded, is dreadful. And not even fun and campy bad. Unwatchable bad. Coulda been a good movie but it isn't. Effects, direction, even the score is a joke. Without question one of the worst movies I have ever seen and possibly the worst movie I've seen. Zero chemistry between the characters and a cast of stereotypes right out of central casting.

I know this is a made for streaming kind of film and low budget, but still.. this was sold as an action movie so why is it so boring? The action they do have in it is riddled with jump cuts and shaking camera movements so you can hardly tell what is going on. I know, they do that because this is a low budget film and they have to hide the action because it will look bad if we can actually see a whole body moving at once. Usually you can overlook the lack of action if the plot is good but it is choppy and random. Almost like they wrote the dialogue on set. I'm guessing this was made during the writer's strike.

Horrible script, acting, casting (some good actors but the synergy was not there). Not much positive to write unfortunately on what is a very good story otherwise. The spin of some rogue actors taking credit for this event is the icing on the cake.

Every detail of this film is just so cringey and there is little to redeem this at all. This could have been slightly improved with a consultant who knows this world and the areas involved but they failed in that regard as well.

Instead of wasting your time on this movie go read the many pieces written on this event in several great books (Ronen Bergman, Yossi Melman, Dan Raviv, and others).

After just finished watching pretty much the exact same filmmakers and cast in the Inside Man that was very impressive for an indie production, this film does a 180 and was shockingly a huge mess. I'm a fan of "based on true events" films, especially when they are filmed effectively like Inside Man which was done right for an indie B-film, but sadly this wasn't one of those. The entire normally comfortable 92 min runtime dragged on and on endlessly, with horrible pacing, lackluster direction that made even the few action scenes boring, and a story that was choppy and convoluted. It's hard to believe it was the same writers and directors that made both films, as they are night and day. It's too bad, this had promise, but it just failed to deliver the goods.